Blockchain solves waste and fraud in digital advertising

One step forward, two steps back

We put ads on websites and they broke. Then mobile came along and broke everything again. Bots showed up and started stealing advertiser money by faking impressions and clicks. The viewability crisis came with the realisation that a lot of the ads we were paying for weren’t ever seen by a person. More recently, we’ve seen auction games, fraud and widespread inefficiencies along the digital advertising supply chain waste billions of dollars per year.

Source: pixabay.com

We’ve been burned one too many times, and it shows. Digital advertising is an industry built on the idea of precision at a massive scale, but up to this point it’s been anything but.

At Lucidity, we want to remove doubt from buying media. In building a blockchain-audited analytics platform for advertisers, we want to create more than just transparency in digital advertising.

We want you to have confidence that the media you buy is the media you get.

We created Confirmed Metrics

What are Confirmed Metrics?

If we were to write an official definition of Confirmed Metrics, it might look a little something like this:

There’s quite a bit there, so let’s unpack. Confirmed Metrics take impression, click, video, and other data that occur within an ad creative and match it with equivalent signals from the supply chain.

For instance, a Confirmed Impression is an impression that was not only acknowledged by the ad tracker (when a pixel fires), but also by the DSP and the Exchange involved in that transaction.

Confirmed Metrics will give all relevant parties along the supply chain a say in whether a given marketing event actually happened. By confirming metrics across the supply chain, we can ensure that the data is real and reliable, while simultaneously identifying data sources that haven’t been confirmed. Either from broken connections, bad tech, auction games, like bid caching, or outright fraud.

Confirmed Metrics are therefore a more reliable data point for informing spend decisions, performance optimizations, and overall provide greater transparency into the programmatic ecosystem.

Why do we even need to “confirm” campaign metrics?

One of the original promises of digital advertising was that we’d be able to measure everything that happened; the exact number of ads we served; the popularity of the websites we served them on; how consumers interacted with the ads; whether the ads resulted in a purchase. All of it.

Unfortunately, the promise has only been half-fulfilled. Yes, we do have systems in place that can tally all of these interactions and measure what happens. But the complexity of the digital advertising supply chain has caused the accuracy of these systems to fall short.

There are a couple of specific reasons for this.

Reason #1: The digital advertising supply chain is wasteful by (unintentional) design

You likely know the drill. To run a digital campaign, an advertiser has to (directly or indirectly) work with a number of disparate technologies:

• A DSP to deliver the ad
  
• An SSP to find an appropriate website based on targeting parameters
  
• A viewability vendor to ensure that the ad was viewable, and so on

These technologies have to complete a series of complicated handoffs – flawlessly. Due to occasional bad tech or poor integrations, it doesn’t always happen.

Making matters worse, many of the technologies might follow different measurement standards or employ different reporting practices. In other words, your ad server might count an impression according to one set of criteria. The DSP you use might employ an entirely different set of criteria to count that same impression.
Because each is a black box, advertisers often have no real way of knowing what’s going on behind their closed doors.

In short, when things go wrong, it’s hard to know why.

This creates waste from two main sources:

• Waste from inefficiencies, usually manifested in the form of data discrepancies. Due to widespread inconsistencies in measurement and reporting, marketing events get counted differently. This results in data that doesn’t match.

• Waste from fraud, whereby “bad actors” take advantage of the opaque programmatic environment to implement self-serving practices behind the scenes. These practices might distort campaign performance, or fake metrics entirely in order to siphon advertiser money.

Confirmed Metrics help advertisers avoid waste in their media buy. Discrepancies provide us with a clue that something fishy is going on, possibly a bad integration, unseen auction games, or even fraud.

If certain inventory sources are producing a lot of discrepancies, then match rates from those sites will be low. By avoiding placements with high levels of unconfirmed metrics (and low match rates) advertisers can avoid the sources of waste that lurk in the dark.

Reason #2: The digital advertising supply chain has limited transparency

The technologies that sit along the programmatic supply chain are black boxes. You could also call them silos. Data goes in, it doesn’t come out, and each participant has no way to know what the other participants are seeing.

At best, a technology that sits along the supply chain can listen to one participant to the left and one to the right.

We can illustrate this further in two ways.

• The first is through transparency depth, which illustrates how deep a participant is able to see to the left and to the right of a given transaction. For example, a DSP will only have a direct connection to its agency and the exchange. On the other hand, an agency is only connected to the advertiser and the DSP. An advertiser, like a publisher, can only ever access information from one level of depth.

• The second is through transparency height, which illustrates how connected one supply chain participant is to another like-participant for a given transaction. For example, DSPs don’t have transparency into how other DSPs are bidding and for how much. Likewise, an exchange won’t have transparency into why a publisher didn’t choose the bid it returned for a given impression opportunity.

As information (read: data) is passed from one participant to the next, it gets unintentionally distorted or altered.

For an advertiser tracking a single campaign, it becomes impossible to navigate this disconnected web of black boxes in order to understand what’s happening. This makes agreeing on campaign data difficult, discrepancies inevitable, and waste hard to spot.

Confirmed Metrics provide advertisers with a reliable way to know whether or not all relevant participants along the supply chain saw the same metric and confirmed it (in real time) without having to contact the participant directly.